In a perfect web world, your web site landing pages would have great conversion rates. A usability expert, user behavior observations, and qualitative research would be a part of every web design project. You would have hard data to know what works before unleashing your designs.

The reality is most B-to-B marketers don’t have the budgets or time to include this type of testing to optimize landing pages. But this doesn’t mean you should resign yourself to continue blindly driving visitors to your site, not knowing why your landing pages aren’t working or how to fix them.

Getting results from your landing page
If you’re running a campaign and not seeing results on your landing page, consider A/B testing. Although it has limitations, A/B testing is an inexpensive and relatively simple way to improve your site’s conversion rates.
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To Lead or Follow?

It’s always a tough question that requires insight and thought. Are you a trailblazer and take the risk of leading the pack or choose to follow along with the established program?

With all of the new 2.0 technologies and initiatives that are available at our fingertips, many prospective advertisers are fighting this battle. Treading on unfamiliar territory can be scary and unsettling but that shouldn’t ultimately lead to the back seat.

According to Advertising Age, General Motors, the country’s third-largest advertiser, is getting ready to shift half of its $3 billion budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next three years. Surely, that decision to be an industry advertising leader will help to set them apart and reach a larger audience.
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I’m back in the creative seat again. I volunteered to step in and head our creative staff after we agreed Jim Everhart, my predecessor, should spearhead our hyperintegration efforts.

I’m looking at things from a slightly different perspective now – a perspective of someone with a lead “creative” title and responsibilities. As I remove my account manager hat, something strikes me. We creative folks have more tools at our disposal – blogs, podcasts, email marketing, and the list goes on. Our primary function has always been to think of new and unique ways to tell our client’s story, demonstrate a benefit and craft compelling ways to reach out to a marketer’s various constituents – engineers, channel partners, integrators, other influencers and ultimately, end-users.

Sure, we still need to apply our traditional creative skills, but we now have these new, exciting tools at our disposal.
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Everyone has their individual reasons as to why they measure their marketing efforts. The way I see it, we all fall into four categories: Justification of Budgets, Evaluation of Tools and Tactics, Insight into Customer Behavior, and Predicting and Projecting Results. Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we need to satisfy the most basic reason before we can move up to the more complex reason, and no matter how high you have progressed, the levels below are still extremely important. I like to call it the Hierarchy of Analytical Needs.

Here is a quick look at each of the levels.

Justification of Budgets
The lowest level of Hierarchy of Analytical Needs can best be explained with the following scenario: The CFO of your company walks into your office to discuss the need for budget cuts.
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The American Marketing Association recently released a new definition for the word “marketing’.  (http://www.marketingpower.com/content2653039.php)

The new definition reads:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

The previous definition stated:

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

I think the biggest addition to the definition is the word “exchanging”.  In this new media landscape of social networks, blogs, mobile and consumer generated
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In the lead article in the December 10 issue of B2B magazine, Kate Maddox outlined “the top 10 marketing trends for 2008, based on interviews with marketers, ad agencies, media executives, analysts and other industry experts.” Read article.

The top 10 are green marketing, globalization, the shift to online, customer in control, embracing web 2.0, improving operations, targeted and personal events, integrating media platforms, going mobile and blended search.

The marketers interviewed include top tier marketers such as Boeing, Caterpillar, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Siemens and UPS. But what about the rest of us? (Okay, we’re an agency but we came from and still serve primarily non-top-tier B-to-B marketers. You know – the real world.)

We think the top 10 list is on target.
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With all the talk of an impending recession, marketers will have to be better than ever at proving the return on investment they can provide. As sales start to decline, marketing budgets are always among the first to be cut.

With the increase of digital marketing, tracking ROI is becoming increasingly easier. Yet a study completed recently by the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) and reported by a recent article on BtoB Online found a vast majority of small businesses do not track ROI on lead generation programs. That brings me to the question—How do these marketers know if their programs are working? Without solid metrics to help justify the worth of your programs, your programs and future ones like them may be hard to validate. As budgets contract, these metrics may be your saving grace.

As marketers continue planning for 2008, marketing analytics should be a solid part of their program.
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"Brand ambassador" is term generally used to refer to a company's employees and relates to their ability to represent the brand in a positive fashion. For example, when I did a  search on the term I got the following result:

"Every Honeywell employee is a brand ambassador. With every customer contact and whenever we represent Honeywell, we have the opportunity either to strengthen the Honeywell brand or to cause it to lose some of its luster and prestige."

I have also seen it used to describe celebrities that are hired as spokespeople. For example, that same search gave me these results:

"Toyota has roped in actor Aamir Khan as its Brand Ambassador for its utility vehicle Innova."

"TAG Heuer today announced Hollywood superstars Brad Pitt and Uma Thurman as brand ambassadors."

In the Web 2.0 world we are engaging new technologies to communicate with our prospects and customers.
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Web 2.0 has presented us with a dazzling array of new communications tactics we can use to reach B-to-B audiences. It has also added an equally impressive assortment of measurement capabilities.

Where we once may have had a handful of print ads, direct mail pieces, brochures, and press releases in an integrated program, we might now have dozens of online ads, scores of Google Adwords, and an e-mail program to thousands of recipients, all segmented by interest.

And where we had 800 number phone calls and bounce-back cards returned, we now can count impressions, clicks, open rates, delivery rates, conversions, and search ratings.

It’s not an overstatement to say that we’re in danger of being overwhelmed by all the data. John Wanamaker’s desire to know “which half works” could seem even further away than ever.

But out of this concern comes a huge opportunity for marketing.
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In the B-to-B marketing world, most companies sell products and services to relatively well-understood market niches or groups of prospects. So even though you may use broader communication tactics such as advertising and public relations to communicate branding and product messages to markets in total, it makes sense to use direct marketing tactics to deliver more tailored messages to smaller sets of potential customers.

To build brand affinity and deliver important messages, B-to-B marketers have long relied on direct mail and newsletters to deliver important company news and product information to known customers. These tools help supplement direct sales contact and keep you “top of mind” to your audience. Digital communications channels such as e-mail, e-newsletters and other tactics are making the task of customer cultivation, easier, faster, and more efficient.
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